#state of lte

It's been 6 months since OpenSignal released a State of LTE Report with the Philippines getting an average of 8.59Mbps. In terms of 4G availability, the Philippines ranked 72nd (out of 75) with 52.77% LTE coverage ( the percentage of the time that users can connect to a 4G network). This is a little better than the 44.8% LTE availability that the Philippines got back in November 2016. South Korea leads the pack with 96.38% LTE availability and Japan at 93.48%. Since we beta tested the LTE service of Smart from last year (it ended around March), I've been asked a lot of times when they will officially launch the service in the Philippines. We were expecting that by June, Smart would have already launched its LTE service commercially and we'd actually be able to experience those blazing fast mobile internet speeds (I was getting as fast as 40Mbps on SpeedTest and up to 2MB/s on torrents). During the beta phase back in February, we were told that Smart was fast-tracking the network upgrade and their engineering team was working 24/7 equipping the base stations for LTE deployment. “Every single base station of Smart is now easily upgradeable to fourth-generation technologies like HSPA+ and LTE,” added Smart president and CEO Napoleon L. Read more in our articles including "Philippines at 8.59Mbps on LTE this 2017 - OpenSignal" and "Smart completes roll-out of 9,500 LTE base stations".